No One Writes To The Colonel, By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez, writer of No One Writes To The Colonel focuses on a retired military colonel living in Colombia during La Violencia. Throughout the story the Colonel is battling with being able to collect his government pension as he and his wife are struggling to make ends meet and are having to make tough decisions on how to make the little money they do have last them as much as possible. Throughout the story we see the impacts of the Violencia on the everyday citizen. Marquez was born in Colombia in 1927 and he lived through the Violecia time period in Colombia, having lived through this time period Marquez knows exactly what was happening during this time from a first hand experience which means that while the story is fictional …show more content…

The first way that Marquez shows us the censorship is with the newspapers in the story. The text says “Ever since there's been censorship, the newspapers talk only about Europe,' he said. 'The best thing would be for the Europeans to come over here and for us to go to Europe. That way everybody would know what's happening in his own country.'” (Marquez 19). In this quote Marquez is showing us one of the ways that the government is controlling the narrative of what is going on in this situation. The majority of the “Local” in this case would be what's going in the country as a whole is censored while what is going on in Europe is shown. This is what led the colonel to say that it would be better if everyone switched places to get the news from their own country. While this quote its self might be a little funny thinking about everyone switching palace to get their news the problem lies in flow of information. What I mean by this is the impact that this censorship has on the citizens. With the censorship in the newspapers this means that one the most obvious one they won't get the local news. But it also means they will be unaware of what the government is doing to their neighbors in other locales within the country or how and if certain people are in opposition of the government and what these groups are doing to fight and what the government is doing to them to silence them. And while we might think that it